It was worth camping overnight to watch the sun rise between the darked Matha’s Children peaks from Cat Back Ridge. Around Memorial Day, the sunrise catches the groove between those points at the very place it begins to peek over the horizon, shedding an eerie backlight through the fog topping the valleys below.

Being Memorial Day, the (Less than – in my opinion) Honorable Rep. Hiram Peabody will be putting the final touches on his dull-witted speech he delivers each Memorial Day in hopes of getting re-elected to the easy life in Washington. There will be the dutiful mention of local recently dead soldiers, and of those stoned into immortality atop pedestals in Remembrance Park. Afterwards he will kiss the cheerleader (a professional kiss, not a real one) who will have floated through town in the Memorial Day procession atop the hood of a new Lincoln described tastefully as being proudly provided by Jones Brothers Ford.

Lesser winds will follow Peabody, while most people begin flocking to the food and local beer that will provide most of real entertainment on this occasion of importance. The VFW survivors will wear hats, and talk of old times mostly to each other; others have tired of their war stories long ago. A few Viet Nam vets will ride their Harleys to let the world know they still have a chip on their shoulder about not being welcomed home as heroes.

In this holiday, a few will remember people whom they had really known that died in conflict. These are actual wounds rather than the mythical wounds some will imagine they suffer when speeches stir them to fantasize about wars they can only know from the words of others.

At the Buddhist temple I attend, there’s an ihei that permanently resides in the meditation hall with the inscription something like “In Memory of All Who Have Died in Conflict.” It is this feeling that really settles in on me this morning on Cat Back Ridge. It is the raging sadness of realizing the breadth of war in the human spirit and the suffering it causes, and how little we in the United States are aware or concerned about that. Our Memorial Day celebration will only honor our dead; there won’t be single mention of how needless some of those deaths were, or the grue of innocents dying in our “victory” as “collateral damage.” Every culture honors its own; it’s the nature of culture to create posthumous honor about the dead to encourage more to die in hopes that they too might be honored. We are no better or no worse than others the world around.

My friend Paul thinks that any war the U.S. wages is a just one, demanding patriotic self-sacrifice anytime the country asks. He served in WWII; his opinion is understandable, even if wrong. My friend Ian believes he can distinguish between just and unjust wars; he vigorously denounces the unjust ones, and dutifully honors and supports the just ones. Travis and Marshall, being Quakerly, think all war wrong and cannot support any – no matter what the provocation and cause. Peggy, a Buddhist monk, thinks sometimes wars have to be fought – like a WWII; she was in England as a child during WWII.

Yet as I think about it the only conclusion I can come to is “I don’t know.” War is like a disease that blinds and kills. There is no good smallpox, friendly smallpox, or smallpox that can be overlooked because a “friend” is carrying it. Though mankind has thousands of years experience and hundreds of millions of deaths to tell him about this disease, he still believes blindly that this one is somehow different, and the outcome will be different. We do not realize that when we unleash this disease that it will always be somewhat out of control, and unintended consequences will always make it much more horrible than we wanted.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died as a direct result of our actions; yet I still sometimes hear the claim of complete innocence. “Not our fault” We do understand our own casualties, and often believe them to be victims of some horrible monster beyond belief. Because our streets are clean and orderly though, we cannot fathom living in the disorder and chaos created elsewhere. And because we cannot imagine it, it must not exist. Few can muster any sympathy at all. The big picture is that war always unleashes hell. That’s the big picture – the one that most people will never see. They can only see one side of the coin. And that’s the side every culture will honor on its version of Memorial Day.

It’s the “I don’t know” part of what I think about war that troubles me. I feel honest gratitude toward many who fought in WWII to push back that dark wave of evil threatening to sweep the world. I laid flowers at the graves of my own ancestral kinfolk who fought in the Civil War, and thereby attempted to honor the effort and memory of some poor W. Virginia farmer’s sons who thought the Union, and its eventual liberation of the slaves, to be worth dying for. My respect was sincere. And there is something that touches me at a human level about nonprofessional soldiers serving a cause at the risk of life, fortune, and family – regardless of how misguided their involvement might have been. This too I can honor.

So I honor this day, in concert with the temple ihei, all the dead who died in conflict – on both sides in any war. That’s the greatest majority of the dead – unwept, unmourned, unremembered. They will be ignored by most of the world, but I pause to pay them respect and to try to understand how deeply some of them must have suffered – rightly or wrongly. As I reflect, a sad melancholy sits on me like the valley fog. I have no illusions. There are no easy fixes. Wars will continue to come and go. Changing a politician or two won’t fix things permanently even in my local world, and the rest of world is completely beyond my influence. My views are so mixed and unclear. I can’t find any real solid moral or philosophical ground to put my walking stick on.

In the dawning, I see life stirring. And then I hear it. And it seems like that patch of fog isn’t quite as dense as it was a few minutes ago. As far as my eyes can see, I don’t actually see any of the things that are troubling me. The few remaining sky orbs of the night are slipping into invisibility. A bug just bit me. And the cool chill of the morning prompts me for a fire, some coffee, and some food. As coffee thins my blood, my melancholy dissipates with the warmth of life – including human life with its ignorant and persistent dance with war and destruction. I resolve anew to be on the side of life – all life – to be an active part of the good I want for the world, rather than focusing on the evil that needs to be displaced. I bow to all life – to all those who have died in conflict, and to those who will die in future conflicts.

I raise my freshly filled coffee cup to the morning breeze. ‘Cheers to all the “I don’t knows” that drive me up the wall.’

Next week: A visit from Deacon or Yowie. I don’t know who’s going to show up.